The leather grabs at my clothing as I slowly sink into the overstuffed burnt sunset colored couch. It's an awkward color that was probably better off left as a crayon in Crayola's 96 pack with the sharpener in the back. It's sweltering here on the back porch, and the leather is only causing my body to sweat more; I am sweating almost as much as the cold green glass bottle of Yuengling positioned in my left hand. I watch my friends play silly drinking games on the folding plastic table next to the pool. There are two nubile young ladies in bikinis on one side who are trying to use their bodies to distract the shirtless young men throwing ping-pong balls on the other side.

The scene plays out, and my drunken state of mind can only focus on the way the girls bodies move as their bodies arch to toss the small white balls back, hoping to land them in deep towers of red filled with shallow pools of golden beer. And even then, my mind wanders away from them and my eyes close as my mind becomes fixated on the shrieks and yells of the good summer time fun going on around me. The haze around my mind dulls the noise to a point that allows me to enter something resembling a trance, or what some might mistake for a light sleep.

My body senses the shallow depression your body forms in the leather next to me, and the skin and hair on my arm registers you laying yourself onto me. My body is alive with trying to communicate your nearness to me, but all I can think about is, when did it get dark? You know how to pull me out of my sleepy haze as you manifest a soft kiss upon my eager lips, and then entwine your fingers with mine before pulling my arm around you as if it were a heavy down blanket and we were in the middle of winter. You've brought me another beer to replace the empty one I'd fallen asleep with, and after I graciously accept you administer another kiss, and somewhere deep inside I wonder what it would be like to spend the rest of my life with you.

The moon sat in the sky like a pumpkin that had been left forgotten and abandoned on the front stoop. Spending all day out of sight, because it was out of mind, but none the less absorbing the rays of the sun, so that in the dark of a cloud covered night (but also in the light of the single constantly burning bulb in front of the door) it stood alone and sagging. Its facial features were becoming compressed to a point of making one question their own vision, and it's rind had faded to something less like autumn leaves and more like, well something orange and faded. But this isn't about pumpkins, its about the moon that was still too low to be quarter sized and stark white, yet it was all the light we had there on that beach.

The hotel was dark because it was abandoned. We'd spent the better part of the night wandering it's halls, moving in and out of rooms, and up and down stairwells. Somewhere deep inside we wondered if maybe we shouldn't be there, but after a couple pulls on our flasks, a joint or two, and a pack of cigarettes between the two of us all we knew was it was right for us to be doing anything as long as we could be around one another just a little longer. There in those dark corridors I stole kisses in the darkest corners of stairway landings, abandoned bedrooms, and dusty hallways.

But now we were on the beach, and it was just as dark, but instead of a steady back beat of creaking walls and laughter, we were serenaded by the sound of waves regularly crashing into the beach crushing shells and rocks and dead things into more sand, and making sure the sand staid sand and didn't get any ambitions about being anything more then sand. But it was there in the dark of the moon that was still too low to be bright that the kisses were no longer stolen but given with an enthusiasm that almost pulled us down to the sand, for restraint had been abandoned somewhere in the darkness of the hotel.